Long FortyEight
by GoddessofSnark
Summary: It would be a long 48 hours, and sacrifices would have to be made. And Jack was willing to make those sacrifices.


There were few things that could cause Jack Rudolph to be speechless. Danny Tripp walking into his office was one of those few things. It wasn't that the executive producer of the most successful, or rather only successful show on the network had walked in, it was that he had walked in when he had. That was the problem. He wasn't supposed to be walked in on, head down, hovering inches above the table. He wasn't supposed to be seen at all like this.

And most of all, Danny wasn't supposed to just stand there watching him. He wasn't supposed to be looked at. He wasn't supposed to be looking at an expressionless face. Danny was supposed to be screaming at him, shaking his head sadly, doing something more than staring impassively at him, as though he had simply been staring at the sports page on his computer and too engrossed to notice someone had walked into the room.

"I need to talk to you about something, but if now's a bad time, I can come back." Danny gestured to the door.

"What's it about?" There was no such thing as a bad time for Jack. Everything was a bad time for him. There was nothing about running a network that could go right. If something did well, then something else would go catastrophically wrong. Which would usually lead to stock prices catastrophically dropping. Which would mean him losing his job.

Not that he needed to work, but he had nothing else to do with his life. It would get boring to not work at all. He needed something to stress him and make him do something. He would rather die than retire. "Studio 60." He rolled his eyes. That was fairly obvious. It wasn't as though Danny would walk in there to talk about the new season of whatever the new crime drama they had picked up was. Something like _Blood and Guts IV: The Attack of the Cops._ His brow furrowed, no that was one of the movies that one of the sister companies was putting out.

"What about Studio 60?"

"We can't go on this week."

"You have no choice." He couldn't pull an episode that they'd been airing promos of all week. He couldn't pull an episode on Thursday and expect not to be demoted to coffee boy, if he was even still working for TMG.

"We can't go on the air." Jack blinked, and looked down at the bag on his desk. He had the feeling he'd be needing a lot of it in the next forty eight hours.

"Why not?"

"We're down a writer, Tom just broke his leg and is sitting in the ER waiting to get a cast on it, Cal's been projectile vomiting, Harriet's starting to show, and Simon just got punched by a neo-nazi in the parking lot. He's with Tom, getting his teeth put back in his mouth."

Jack's teeth clenched, and his eyes closed as he silently counted to five before he did something irrational, like attempting to strangle God. "Oh, and the stage crew's union contract expires at midnight. But, that's supposed to be a quick deal, and shouldn't affect us tomorrow." His fingers clenched around the lip of his desk.

"I can't cancel it now." It was too late to call an end to the show. How the hell they were supposed to run a show with no stage crew and no scabs he didn't know, but that was for people on the payscale below him to figure out. He was just supposed to make sure that however that happened, it didn't affect the stock price.

"It's going to be a long forty eight." He nodded in response, unable to say much more. He saw the other man's brown eyes stray to the bag still on his desk, and then back up to his own. There was a silent exchange, there was no need for words. He had been cold and heartless in the past. He wasn't cold, he wasn't heartless, he was just trying to make sure that his network was the best.

His job was to make sure that they were the highest traded media network. Or at least try to. If sacrifices had to be made, he'd make them. And he knew that Danny understood that. Sometimes things had to be sacrificed for the greater good. He'd deal with the fallout of this decision later. They needed the ratings, they needed the show to go on more than he needed a sober executive producer.

And Danny needed to be able to give it a hundred and ten percent for the next two days. And Jack would sacrifice anything to make sure that everyone on that cast was giving a hundred and ten percent-his life depended on it. There was a moment of guilt as he nodded at the other man, as he considered what exactly he was telling Danny to do.

A greedy hand snatched out, before the movement jerked to a stop, and he watched as Danny carefully grabbed the bag, sticking it his pocket. He was potentially destroying a life-destroying a family-for ratings. But this was Hollywood. Sacrifices had to be made at times. Danny may have been one of the few people he counted within his circle of friends, but the network came first. It didn't mean that he wouldn't try to make it up.

"Danny?"

"Hmm?"

"I owe you a completion bond."


End file.
